I believe they own and operate their own servers. As far as I know, every post ever made is still up on the website except ones removed by the moderators. Posters can and do embed graphics in their post.
Free Republic has to pay power costs for however many servers and work stations they operate plus whatever ISP fees they have. I also imagine that there are also techie costs.
What does this add up to? Don’t know, but I know it ain’t cheap.
Yes, but the servers are located in a data center. Data center fees are significant.
No lost many posts before about 2001?
Servers in a different location
“As far as I know, every post ever made is still up”
That alone is astonishing, isn’t it? It’s easy to find posts from almost 30 years ago.
“Posters can and do embed graphics in their post.”
Graphics are not embedded. Only the link.
FR switched to Akamai hosting a few years back…saves on trips to San Jose to fix server hardware.
https://www.akamai.com/products/cpu